The Grandchild Clause’s Seeds of Compromise

In “The Looming War Over Israel’s Law of Return,” Rafi DeMogge writes that Israel’s “religious right believes in a state that is at its core first and foremost Jewish. . . . By contrast, the liberal camp’s Israel is built on the Herzlian idea of Jewish normalcy.”

Identifying starkly contrasting visions for Israel with significant consequences for immigration policy, DeMogge concludes that the decades-old conflict between Jewish and Israeli identity is “unlikely to be resolved anytime soon,” and that the Grandchild Clause—a 1970 proviso to the Law of Return granting anybody with at least one Jewish grandparent the right to Israeli citizenship—“will be at its center.” Through a careful examination of demographic and political trends, he paints a sobering, and all-too-credible, picture of an ever-more fractured Israel.

In this short response, I wish to argue that the outlook isn’t quite so dire as DeMogge suggests. Although Israel’s Jews are indeed divided over the question of Jewish-versus-Israeli identity, this division does not give rise to “starkly contrasting visions for Israel.” The problem, in my view, lies elsewhere: in those using positions of power and influence to undermine social compromise in favor of extreme and polarizing positions. I’ll begin by looking at the rifts in Israeli society.